While Ramola checks her phone for return texts or calls (there are none) Natalie shouts and her heavy stomps are accompanied by small smashes and crashes, the breaking of little things.
Ramola says, “Are you all right? Stay where you are. I’m coming to you.”
She walks through the other end of the kitchen to the hallway and its beige peeling wallpaper. She passes the stairs and portals to other darkened rooms on the way to a spare room at the rear of the house turned makeshift bedroom. Perhaps the home’s owner preferred sleeping here instead of relying on the chairlift each night to get to the master bedroom on the second floor. The doorframe outlined in molding has no door. A queen-size unmade bed claims most of the space in the square-shaped room. The wooden headboard has ornate bedposts as thick as elephant tusks, tapering to oval, egg-shaped knobs. Along the opposite wall are a box-furniture-store armoire and another rocking chair, this one buried under a mound of clothes. Natalie is a silhouette across from the foot of the bed, standing in front of a dresser that partially blocks the room’s only window, the gray outside light further dimmed by lace curtains.
Natalie stands in profile. Her respirator mask is gone. She spits out random, monosyllabic vowel-based sounds. She paws through the dresser’s dwindling set of knickknacks, small porcelain animals and dolls, and she smashes them into the walls and floor.
Ramola turns on the ceiling light; only one bulb of the two within the domed fixture works. She nearly tiptoes into the room while saying, “Natalie, let’s get you in bed, all right? Have a lie-down. You need rest.”
Natalie pushes and rocks the dresser front to back, front to back, spilling the remaining figurines. The top drawers slide open and closed like loose, wagging tongues.
Natalie turns toward the doorway, toward Ramola. Saliva drools in a thick line from her bottom lip and chin. Above her top lip is a mustache of accumulated white foam. Her eyes go lidless they open so wide. They are the glistening, reasonless eyes of lunacy, of vacancy and the transformed, of the werewolf and the vampire and the zombie and all the other monsters centuries of folklore and myth have attempted to ascribe to the rabid human face.
Natalie exclaims, “Oh!” and smiles, but it’s not a smile. Her head tilts forward, pulled by the same new gravity drooping her shoulders and pulling her chest into kyphosis. Her facial muscles spasm and quake, her lips fissure, upper lip lifting into a V over an exposed canine. She rushes at Ramola, angrily shouting.
Ramola holds up her hands and drifts backward toward the doorway. Before she can say anything more than her name, Natalie is on top of her. She grabs a fistful of Ramola’s left sleeve and pulls her arm toward her open mouth. Ramola bends her knees, dropping her weight, which straightens her arm and allows her to squirm it out of the coat. She pops back up and spins, attempting to free her other arm as well. Caught mid-turn, Natalie two-handed shoves her between the shoulder blades. Outsized and outweighed, Ramola is sent tumbling into the hallway, careening into the wall and landing awkwardly on her right side. Her shoulder absorbs the brunt of the collision with a spike of bright pain.
Natalie lumbers into the hallway and kicks Ramola’s left leg, mid-thigh, a direct hit but on the muscle and without much leverage behind it. Next, she tries to stomp down on Ramola’s knees but misfires, throwing herself off-balance, tilting her weight. Forced to put her hands on the wall to catch herself and recalibrate, Natalie gives Ramola an opening.
Ramola scrabbles onto her feet and sprints down the hallway, to its other end. She pauses in the entryway at the chairlift and bottom of the stairs where most of the contents of Josh’s pack remain on the floor. Natalie gives chase but she is breathing heavily and moving slower, her quick-burst attack already depleting her body’s energy and strength reserves. At least, Ramola hopes that’s the case.
Ramola briefly considers running upstairs, but without knowing the layout she fears being trapped. She also doesn’t want Natalie falling or hurting herself or the baby climbing up and down the stairs. Instead she hangs the loop of rope off her barking right shoulder and grabs the roll of duct tape. She waves her hand in a come-here gesture and she talks in the calmest voice she can manage, telling Natalie it’s time to go to bed, time for rest.
The sound of Ramola’s voice has the opposite of the intended effect. Natalie clambers down the hallway that is either shrinking or she is filling, roaring more nonsense, the nonwords an aural virus, infecting Ramola’s head with a near-blinding fear. Moving too slowly initially, Ramola bumbles into the kitchen, her feet sputtering on the linoleum. Regaining some of her composure, she darts through the room and into the hallway. Backtracking to the rear of the house, Ramola runs at full throttle to expand the distance between her and Natalie.
Returning to the bedroom, Ramola leaps onto the bed and crab-crawls into its middle, crouched but with her legs coiled under her. Her first attempt at opening the duct tape goes awry as the tape sticks to her latex gloves. She tears off a strip and the gloves, tosses them into a dark corner. She rips open another length of tape, leaving one end attached to the roll.
Natalie billows into the room, screaming between gasping breaths. She knocks into the bed with both legs, as though not realizing
